The technology disclosed herein relates to an image pickup apparatus and an image processing method wherein a lens array is used.
Various image pickup apparatus have been proposed and developed and are disclosed in, for example, PCT Patent Publication No. WO06/039486, Japanese Patent Publication No. Hei 5-76234, Japanese Patent Publication No. Hei 7-8055, and Japanese Patent No. 3182009 as well as Ren Ng, and seven others, “Light Field Photography with a Hand-Held Plenoptic Camera,” Stanford Tech Report CTSR 2005-02. Also an image pickup apparatus in which a predetermined image process is carried out for picked up image data and resulting data are outputted has been proposed. For example, in the first-mentioned patent document and the non-patent document mentioned above, an image pickup apparatus which uses a method called “Light Field Photography” is disclosed. In the image pickup apparatus, a lens array is disposed on a focal plane of an image pickup lens and an image sensor is provided on a focal plane of the lens array. Consequently, it is possible for the image sensor to receive a video of an image pickup object formed on the lens array while dividing the video into rays of light in various viewpoint directions and acquire multi-viewpoint images at the same time.